Bright's Passage: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

Didn’t I just tell you that?”
    “Real, real soon, then?” There came a ripping sound, and a scrap of white fabric floated to the ground. The horse snorted.
    Bright brushed the girl’s hands away from her dress once more. “Yes. Now stop tearing at that. Take your hands away and stop messing with it!”
    Dawn was breaking as they melted out of the darkness of the woods and into the tenuous circle of habitation that he had reclaimed from the wilderness in the month since he’d returned from the War.
    She got down from the horse and stood in the center of it all, surveying the little farmyard expectantly as Bright looped the animal’s tether loosely around the chestnut tree and then went to the stream to dunk his head in the water. He came up gasping from the cold.
    “You might want to wash yourself too,” he said, rubbing an arm across his forehead as he looked at her. “Get cleaned up a bit.” The girl stood where she was. He disappeared into the cabin and came back with a clean shirt on.
    “You ain’t washed up yet,” he said. “You’re filthy, girl. Goddamn.” In the morning light the girl’s face and hands had lost the marble whiteness with which they’d glowed in the gloom of the previous evening.
    “Stay there,” he said. “I’m going to get the Bible. Will you stay right there?”
    “I’ll stay. I’ll stay right here with this tired old horse. He’s a nice horse. Aren’t you a nice horse?” She reached up to scratch the animal’s ears.
    “You don’t need a Bible,” the horse said. “Come here and stand near the bride.”
    He immediately turned around and came to stand near Rachel.
    “I thought you were going to get the Bible,” she said.
    “We don’t need it.”
    “Ask the bride her name.”
    “Her name’s Rachel!” he burst out. “You know that’s her name! She’s all you been talking about!” Then, remembering that she was standing right there beside him, he ducked his chin to his chest and looked at her bare feet. “I been talking about you to my horse,” he said, forcing a chuckle out.
    “You have?” The girl giggled as she stroked the horse’s head.
    “You must ask the girl her full name. This is a sacred ceremony.”
    “For God’s sake.” Bright stomped a foot on the ground.
    “What?” Rachel asked.
    “Nothing.” Bright sighed. “What’s your name, Rachel? Your full name, is what I mean.”
    “It’s Miss Rachel Stallsworth Murtry Marion Morse,” she said, and then, unaccountably, “On account of us being Catholic on the Lady Stallsworth’s side.”
    “What does that mean?” he asked, perhaps to the horse and perhaps to the girl.
    “I don’t know,” the girl said.
    The horse said nothing.
    “Well, now it’s Bright and you’re my wife, unless somebody has problems with that,” he said significantly, “somebody who makes me go all over the country riding up inside other people’s houses, and stealing people’s daughters.” He spoke expectoratingly into the big face of the horse.
    The animal ran its velvet muzzle along the pale floe of the girl’s collarbone and paid Bright no mind.
    “Well,” he said, putting his hands on his hips, “you gonna forever hold your peace, or what?”
    The horse snuffled with evident pleasure in the girl’s scraggled hair. The girl shied flirtatiously from its attentions.
    Bright burrowed his eyes like bullet holes into the animal as it tossed its head for the girl’s amusement. After a long momentof silence, he continued. “All right. Then I guess we’re married now.”
    He took Rachel by the hand and pulled her away from the lecherous animal’s ears mid-scratch. “Over there”—he motioned toward the cabin—“is where we live. There’s where the chickens live. You always been good with them. Those are the goats. This here is a beaten-down old farm horse with no sense in it at all.” He was about to point out the stream but she had already begun walking toward it, not even stopping as she